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Charles W. Eliot, educational reformer and long-time Harvard president, was fond of remarking that a five-foot shelf could hold enough books to substitute for a good liberal education. As Eliot approached retirement, P.F. Collier & Son Publishers invited him to compile fifty volumes, each between 400 and 450 pages, to fill that shelf. Eliot quickly accepted, and the first volume appeared early in 1909. Known colloquially as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, the Harvard Classics became a topic of intense discussion in both literary circles and the mainstream press. An editor's introduction and a reader's guide rounded out the project in early 1910, and Collier's began selling complete fifty-one volume sets. By the time of Eliot's death in 1926, they had sold almost 300,000 of them, amounting to more than 14 million individual volumes. Subsequent sets of Eliot's recommended fiction and Junior Classics also sold well.

Over the course of 2007, I intend to read the Harvard Classics in their entirety, roughly one volume a week. The Whole Five Feet will document this year of reading. I expect to post a brief essay on each volume, again, roughly one a week. I don't have an rss feed, but if you'd like to be notified each time a new essay appears, you can email me at chris@thewholefivefeet.com.

The Harvard Classics are:

The Five Foot Shelf